Pimp your app with AppAdditives

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Getting your Windows Phone or Windows 8 app published is only half the battle. Marketing is the other half. The folks at ExGrip have now made this insanely easy with App Additives. In this post, I’ma give you the rundown of just how easy it is to create some sweet promo materials for your app using their awesome new web based suite of tools.

Register for an account

Head over to appadditives.com and register for a new account. Point #1 for me here; they allow registration & sign in via 3rd parties. Most notably Microsoft Account. Bravo.

Create a new app

After signing in / creating a new account, head to your Dashboard, then the Apps section. Click Add an App.

Now you go find your App’s UUID (Universal Unique Identifier) by loading your Windows Phone dashboard and viewing the entry for the app you want to create some awesomeness for. For this post I’m going to create assets for the Windows Phone application for my blog. Want Windows 8 support? Vote for it on their Uservoice forum.

Hit the ‘Details’ area of the app in question, and grab the App ID:

Put that in to the Add App form of AppAdditives and watch the magic kick off. When it’s all said and done you’ll have it in the list of apps in the “Your Apps” section.

Get Detailed

Now click ‘Edit’ for the entry you just added and we’ll get the goodies. Let’s walk through each option on the Edit page:

Tweet about my app

From time to time, the ExGrip twitter account tweets about apps that use AppAdditives to create promo materials. In my opinion, it’s good to have this active unless you’re creating materials for an app that you don’t want to make public yet. The more people know about it, the better!

Add my app to the gallery

Turning this on allows people to browse the ExGrip/AppAdditives gallery of applications who have created promo material. More importantly, search engines will find it ;)

Fill out a good app description for your app and add some good text to add to tweets about your app, click Save Changes, and let’s move on.

Getting’ the goods

Now to get our goodies. Once you’ve added the app to your list of apps in AppAdditives, you can now create promotional material for it.

In-device shots

On the left-hand bar, click Illustrations then In-Device-Shots.

Choose the app you just added to the list – in my case .Netitude. You’ll see on the next page “No screenshots available…”

Click Upload new screenshot and add the shots you want to use in the in-device shots you’re about to render. Don’t forget to click “Start Upload”! After uploading you’ll be taken back to the app listing. Click the same app (again) and note that the screenshots you upload appear.

Now you need to transform those screenshots in to in-device shots. For each uploaded screenshot, do the following:

Once you’re done with all the ones you wish to utilize in later steps, move on.

Create Illustrations

You now get to use those generated in-device-shots in the other parts of AppAdditives. Firstly Create Illustrations. Much like uploading the in-device shots, click Illustrations then Create Illustrations.

The first two options are up to you; do you want a “waterfall style” illustration, or a “cards style” illustration? Or both? You choose.

I’m going to do Waterfall for this post. After selecting Waterfall, choose the app (.Netitude), then select all the shots you want to include in the mockup.

Then you pick the one in-app shot to use for the mockup. This is the image that shows as being *active* on the screen. Then select the background gradient you want or nothing at all (transparent)

After you’re done you get kicked back to the illustrations page, but let’s go check out what we created!

Click Illustrations then Available Illustrations. Choose the app you were just playing with. Scroll Down (at first I thought nothing happened, but then realized it loaded below)

Here’s what my .Netitude one looks like:

The image on the far right (with the phone border) is the “In-app shot” that you chose. The other 3 are the “in-device shots” that you chose. Obviously once you know this you’ll want to tweak the images you choose and what you choose as the background, but this gives you a good idea as to how it goes about generating thing and where your selections end up.

A similar process is followed to create the “card illustration” but let’s move on to the social card creation and see how awesome that is

Create Social Card

Again click Illustrations –> Create Illustrations

Click Social Cards

Click the logo for the app you’re playing with

Now fill out the form based on the example to the right with text that makes sense for what you want your card to say about your app. Here’s an example of how I filled it out for my blog app:

Click Create and wait for the magic. Again when it’s done it kicks you back to the “Create Illustration” page, so you now need to go look at the illustrations to see what the output looks like.

Click Illustrations –> Available Illustrations

Click the app you’re playing with.

Again don’t be alarmed when nothing on your screen changes; it loaded everything down below so just scroll down.

Here’s what my social card ends up looking like:

Sweet and effortless.

Widgets for your site

Got a site on which you can advertise your cool stuff? Check out the ease with which AppAdditives gives you a nice insert by going to the App-Widgets section. Copy the HTML shown there and…